Loving Jack Books in Order

Nora Roberts’s Loving Jack books connect contemporary romance with a story that steps into the American Old West. The sequence includes Loving Jack, Best Laid Plans and Lawless. Its starting point is a novelist trying to find the right place to work, but the connections reach beyond a single couple. Writing, architecture and construction all play a part, giving the books a shared interest in people who imagine something and then try to make it real.

In Loving Jack, Jackie MacNamara, who goes by Jack, rents a secluded house for three months so she can write. Her novel features the sort of western hero she wishes existed outside her imagination. The arrangement becomes awkward when architect Nathan Powell arrives at his own house, unaware that it has been rented out. He expects her to go, while she is determined to protect the time and space she needs for her manuscript. Their disagreement opens a romance between a practical host and a writer inclined to see possibility everywhere.

Jack has come to work on a fictional love story, but a real one keeps interrupting.

Best Laid Plans moves to a building project where architect Cody Johnson and structural engineer Abra Wilson disagree over what can be constructed. Cody has confidence in his designs, while Abra has to deal with the practical demands of turning ideas into buildings. Working on a resort brings their arguments and attraction into the same place. When someone begins sabotaging the project, the difficulties become dangerous. The book adds suspense to the professional rivalry, making cooperation important for more than their growing personal interest.

Lawless takes a different approach to the connection. It is presented as the novel written by Jackie MacNamara, carrying the reader into the fictional world she has been creating. In the late nineteenth-century Arizona Territory, Sarah Conway is determined to make a home in Lone Bluff. Gunslinger Jake Redman has little patience for the manners she brings from the East, and his partly Apache heritage has made him a target of prejudice. Their relationship tests assumptions about strength, respectability and who can survive on the frontier. This is a historical romance rather than another modern building project.

Read Loving Jack, followed by Best Laid Plans and Lawless, to follow the connections in their usual sequence. The books vary in setting and in how much danger surrounds the romance, but all place strong-willed people in situations where their expectations are challenged. The link to Jack’s writing is especially useful to know before opening Lawless. It explains why a western sits beside two contemporary stories and makes the collection a small exploration of how imagined romance and lived experience can speak to one another.